Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by
The Broke and the Bookish. Every week they post a new topic that the participants come up with a top ten list for.
This week's topic is about our favorite beginnings and endings of books
This is really hard because while I often think "This is an awesome way of beginning a book!" it's kind of hard to remember these things when you should put them on a list...
Here goes in no particular order:
Great opening lines
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”
I love this beginning! It made me immediately want to keep reading!
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - Stephen King
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
One of my all-time favorite series. I read this sentence when I was 15 and I was hooked.
The Demon's Lexicon - Sarah Rees Brennan
"The pipe under the sink was leaking again. It wouldn't have been so
bad, except that Nick kept his favourite sword under the sink."
I devoured this book. Evil magicians, demons, swords under the sink, and tons of snarky humor! And Nick is one of a kind.
Der Process (The Trial) - Franz Kafka
"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."
("Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne dass er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.")
I know many hate Kafka (at least the whole class apart from me did) but I really like his style and the way the power dynamics in his stories work, as well as the way he uses space and dimensions. This translation isn't bad, although 'wrong' should actually be something more like 'evil'.
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
"It was a pleasure to burn. It was a pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and
changed."
Amazing book! If you love reading at all, you've got to read this at some point.
And some favorite closing lines:
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
"The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the
prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses
the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore
in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides
the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think
of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
Not my favorite quote from the book, but still a good way to open things up and round off the story.
The Evolution of Mara Dyer - Michelle Hodkin
"This is what I knew: I was trapped in my body, in that bed, at that moment. But even as I looked out through the windows of my eyes, through the bars of my prison, I knew i wouldn't be trapped forever. They rattled my cage to see if I'd bite. When they released me, they'd see the answer was yes."
Go get them, Mara! This series is soooo good, after that ending I just can't wait for the last book!
The Replacement - Brenna Yovanoff
"I reached for Tate, feeling for the warmth of her hand, and linked my fingers through hers. The only thing that mattered was the weight of her head on my shoulder. Our lives were limitless and unknowable, not perfect, but ours. This was life in Gentry. This is just what we do."
This book has SO many quotable lines, but I just really like this ending as well. It works perfectly.
White Cat - Holly Black
"Marks think they can get something for nothing. Marks think they can get what they don't deserve, and could never deserve. Marks are stupid, and pathetic, and sad. Marks think they're going to go home one night and have the girl the loved since they were a kid suddenly love them back. Marks forget that whenever something's too good to be true, that's because it's a con."
This is an amazing ending because it's the epitome of Cassel's voice, and an important motif in the whole series. I also like it because it is bitter... which is a quote in itself.
Some Quiet Place - Kelsey Sutton
"Fear tries to snatch the keys, but I manage to jerk them away just in time. He scowls down at me. 'The world can spin without me for a few minutes, woman. Come on, I've never driven before.' I laugh, a sound that he cuts short with a kiss that tastes of strawberries and terror."
This is a pretty random choice. It's a book I read fairly recently, and I just really like the ending.
Once more, most of these choices were quite random. It was hard to actually find opening sentences because most of my books are boxed up somewhere so it's not like I can snatch them from the shelf and look up beginnings and endings. But I really like the ones I came up with! What do you think of them? And what did you choose?
